How to Carry Out A SEO Audit On A Website

We are often given a puzzled look from clients when we suggest an SEO audit. They automatically think that it’s going to be time-consuming. While it is true that a giant business with a site that has been around for years may take a few days to a few weeks, the efforts are worth it. If you’re a small business, likely, your audit will only take a few hours, as long as you know what you’re looking for.

For a good SEO audit, you need to identify any problems holding your website back and deciding how to improve your performance in search engines.

Throughout this article, as a professional seo team, we will show you what it takes to perform an SEO audit so your website can begin performing to gain better outcomes.

What Is An SEO Audit and Why Is One Needed?

Let’s first gain an understanding of what an SEO Audit is.

An SEO audit:

• Identifies issues that prevent you from ranking in search engines.
• It should be an objective analysis.
• Looks at page speed, broken links, technical errors, on-page and off-page SEO issues.
• And so much more.

Some of the issues that your webpage may be experiencing can make it difficult for spiders to crawl and index your website. This, in turn, will affect your ranking and cause you to miss out on organic traffic.

For Example, you have a website built a few years ago and have continued to create content for it.

You’ve been doing everything expected for a well-functioning website – ensuring it’s mobile-friendly, loads fast, and optimised content. However, you don’t appear very high on the Google searches for your target keywords. Why is this so?

Doing an SEO audit will help you determine where your content is thin and can be fixed. The audit can help you see the bigger picture and to the bottom of the more significant problem.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Performing an SEO Audit

We will share seven steps with you that are crucial for performing a successful SEO audit. In this information, we include the tools you will need, but before you worry about having to invest in new software, you likely already have some of these listed below:

• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• Google’s Structured Data Tool
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Ubersuggests

Let’s begin going through the steps to start auditing your site:

Step 1: Ensure a version of your site can be browsed

You first need to check that a version of your website can be browsed. Then, think of all the ways it could be typed into a browser:

• http://yoursite.com
• https://yoursite.com
• http://www.yoursite.com
• https://www.yoursite.com

Google will flag your website as not being secure if you have more than one version accessible to users in the browser. Only one version should be browsable, and HTTPS is ideal. The remainder is best 301 redirected to the correct version. This means that if the correct version is https://www.yoursite.com and someone types http://yoursite.com, they will be taken automatically to the original version of the website.

Step 2: Crawl your site

Essential for your website is that spiders must be able to crawl and index it. If even one page isn’t visible to search engines, then your SEO efforts are void.

Ubersuggest, Afrefs or SEMrushare all tools you can use for crawling your website. Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool and is simply used, so for that reason, we will focus on it in this piece.

The process is relatively straightforward:

• Enter your website
• Click search
• Click on site audit

A list will be generated from any SEO issues and suggestions on how they can be fixed.

Further, performing a few Google searches to see how you’re ranking is another step you can take. Is your site ranking first when searching for your name? Also, when searching your keywords, how many pages appear in the results?

For further investigation, searching “site:domainname” can also show you what is showing up in search results.

The vital thing to consider is that if your website isn’t at the top of the search engine results or it seems that pages are missing, you don’t necessarily need to worry. However, it will indicate how effective your SEO is and let you know what areas you need to focus on to improve the results in future.

Step 3: On-page SEO checks

On-page SEO is about the elements that can be used to optimise and rank higher in organic searches:

• Title tags
• Headers
• Meta descriptions
• And so much more

These factors help search engines understand your content and encourage users to click on your pages.

Moving forward, you need to check:

Title Tags: This is the HTML code where Search engines read the page title and appear on the SERPs page as clickable headlines.

Meta Descriptions: Although not one of Google’s ranking factors, Meta helps consumers decide if the content is helpful to them, which means they need to be compelling to encourage click-through.

Headers: Headers and subheadings have are valuable for SEO and help break up the content for users.

Keyword Placement: Try and use these within the first 100 words, and strategically placed throughout subheadings, title tags, anchor text, and image attributes because it maximises SEO efforts.

Site Architecture: This should be clear, logical and easy to follow for consumers and search engines. If too complicated, you will lose visitors.

Step 4: Check for duplicate or thin content

A search engines primary goal is to provide optimum experiences for its users, meaning Google offers the best answer it can, which is why Google looks at the quality of your content.

If there is no value for the reader, then the content will be considered thin. It’s best not to duplicate information or have unlinked pages.

Step 5: Test the speed of your site

Consumers are more likely to bounce if your site takes too long to load. It’s hard to believe a second can make a difference, but it does. A 3-second loading page sees the probability of bounce increase by 32%; a 5-second page takes this number to 90%, which is quite significant. Check your speed on Google PageSpeed Insights to check your website loading speed and optimise images, redirects etc., to improve it. Read this article to know details about improving page speed.

Step 6: Link building opportunities

Auditing SEO allows you to look for link building recommendations and help boost your Domain Authority. It’s best to ensure you link with people who closely relate to your product or service.

Moving Forward

There is so much that SEO can do to help your site rank high on the first page of Google and other websites. We are a professional team that can help you move forward. Get in touch with us today.